Charles Ives Reconsidered reexamines a number of critical assumptions about the life and works of this significant American composer, drawing on many new sources to explore Ives''s creative activities within broader historical, social, cultural, and musical perspectives. Gayle Sherwood Magee offers the first large-scale rethinking of Ives''s musical development based on the controversial revised chronology of his music. Using as a guide Ives''s own dictum that 'the fabric of existence weaves itself whole,'
Charles Ives Reconsidered offers several new paths to understanding all of Ives''s music as the integrated and cohesive work of a controversial composer who was very much a product of his time and place. Magee portrays Ives''s life, career and posthumous legacy against the backdrop of his musical and social environments from the Gilded Age to the present. The book includes contemporary portraits of the composer, his peers, and his teachers, as seen through arc
Trade ReviewA Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2009.
“’Reconsidered’ is exactly the word here. Magee takes on the idolators and the revisionists with equal vigour, and in doing so, restores Charles Ives to a more nuanced and realistic place in the American canon: a man of his times, to be sure, but also an artist who continued to evolve and create. . . . Magee hasn’t just written a very good book about Ives, but a very good book about what Harold Bloom calls 'the anxiety of influence.'”--The Wire
“Magee’s book is a model of contemporary musicology, sympathetically sober in its judgments and interdisciplinary in its methods.”--The Nation
"Magee's provocative and insightful new biography of Charles Ives examines the man, his legend, his music, and its reception. An important work."--Journal of the Society for American Music
"This is in every way an exemplary interpretive study of Ives's aesthetic and compositional career as considered against the background of his biography. . . . A first-rate exposition of current knowledge and thinking about Ives, and Magee's own views are a welcome contribution. Essential."--Choice
"Anyone looking for new windows into the life of this unique composer will find here a rich source, clearly written and abundantly illustrated with photos and copies of musical transcripts."--
American Record Guide
